Sweet and Sour (or Vice-Versa)

• “Stafford Smith advised Binyam that when he appeared before the military tribunal he should represent himself. “His words, not mine, were going to be published by the media,” Stafford Smith writes. Binyam understood. His military commission hearing transcript, as reported by Stafford Smith, reads like a script for a farce. First comes the matter of Binyam’s last name, which has been spelled several ways on different government documents. Therefore, Binyam tells the judge, a Marine Corps colonel named Ralph Kohlmann, that the government is prosecuting a wrongly identified defendant. ‘Four years of—what do you call it?—enhanced torture techniques, and we have the wrong person in court.’ Finally, he says, ‘Call me Count Dracula.'” [NYRB]

• “Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country — for all its flaws — then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable staying there at the church.” [Ben Smith]

• “Fox News’ fate isn’t a simple political equation, as in bad news for Bush = bad news for Fox. In a way, its really the same kind of aesthetic problem that faces any super-hot TV program that’s getting long in the tooth. That is: when you become a hit by perfectly embodying the zeitgeist—as Fox did with its lusty, Starship Troopers-like journo-aggression after 9/11—then you run the risk of seeming like yesterday’s news when that zeitgeist starts to change.” [Tuned In]

• “There’s 800 of them and 450 of them have already said who they’re for…I’d like the other 350 to say who they’re on between now and the 1st of July so we don’t have to take this into convention.” [CBS News]

• “Have you been wondering why Americans are so overweight? Or why certain foods are so cheap? Have you heard our average life expectancy is headed down, not up? Two college friends set out with director Aaron Woolf in search of answers to these questions and were surprised by what they discovered. You will be too as this film follows a crop of corn from seed to your dinner plate.” [AOL via Slashfood]